Does Color Affect SEO?

Photo by Peter Stumpf on Unsplash

When ranking pages, search engines focus on factors such as Meta Descriptions, heading tags, and content quality. Lead generations and what the page visitor sees also play an important role. Hence, this raises the question of whether a color is among the factors affecting your page's ranking. Color affects SEO, and the following is an outline of how it impacts consumer behavior.

Color Psychology

Before outlining how color affects SEO, it's important to understand color psychology and its effects on an individual's judgment. According to science, color greatly affects an individual's body and mind. The concept explains why colors such as blue evoke calmness while orange and red cause excitement. In this case, it greatly impacts consumer behavior and their perceptions of your brand. Marketing experts such as Digital Spotlight choose certain colors to enhance brand visibility because of the impact of such colors on individual psychology. For instance, bright colors attract attention, so the chances are high that an individual would keep reading content on a website with a brightly colored theme. The more time they spend on the page, the higher their chances of purchasing your goods or services.

How Color Matters for SEO

The choice of color can affect your SEO strategy because it determines the lead generation. When visitors spend more time on your website, they will likely buy your products or refer their friends. In this case, the SEO strategy would involve a theme that makes your page interesting enough to keep people browsing content for a long period. If you use a boring theme, the visitors would likely spend minimal time, reducing page leads. When you optimize a website using the right colors, it encourages visitors to act. The main aim of an SEO strategy is to motivate people to take a particular action, such as buying your goods or seeking your service. The best way to use color in enhancing SEO effectiveness is by choosing colors that match the particular items or services you intend to sell to your consumers. For instance, a website that deals with fragrances would benefit from colors such as purple, dark shades of red, and blue. These colors are highly associated with beauty, so a visitor would feel motivated to browse through your products. Black and white form the basic colors for many themes, and your website might appear boring if not mixed with other colors. However, the choice of color would also depend on what your page deals with, and in some scenarios, black and white would facilitate a call to action because it appears professional. Creating an aesthetically appealing website is the best way for your SEO strategy to benefit from color. If your page doesn't have enough traffic, consider redesigning and using colors related to the services you offer or goods sold. The right colors would lead to a substantial increase in web traffic, thus increasing your sales. In most cases, colors work best for the CTA button because it draws attention away from the other content. For instance, a black-and-white theme with a yellow stripe on the CTA button would motivate people to read it. If a person is seeking a particular service, the chances are high that they will seek it without spending minutes browsing your website. It would also reduce the bounce-off rate.

The Technicality of Color in SEO

While color greatly impacts your SEO strategy, it might not always bring positive results. It's a common scenario when you don't use color well during web design. For instance, the theme should create a contrast to make texts easy to read. Therefore, too-bright colors might make it challenging to read a text, and this would increase the bounce-off rate. Don't let your visitors miss the important details due to the choice of a poor color scheme. The click-ability of links highly determines your website's bounce-off rate. Ensure that every link looks like a link through contrasting colors and fonts. Blue is a common color for links; therefore, it would direct your visitors to click the link as soon as they access the page. Uniqueness is an important aspect in determining SEO colors. Choose colors that don't look like what your competitors use. In such a scenario, your consumers might confuse your brand with your competitors and, in turn, buy from them. Hence, ensure that the chosen theme puts your brand in a better position with a competitive edge. Consumers should identify your brand as soon as they see its color scheme without confusing it with other brands. A website with an appealing color scheme is likely to perform better than one with unattractive colors. Therefore, as you formulate an SEO strategy, don't only focus on the content and marketing. Ensure the website is attractive enough to generate reliable leads and convert visitors into buyers.

Digital Spotlight by Naomi Cook.